Paul O Williams - [Pelbar Cycle 02]

by The Ends of the Circle (v0. 9) (epub)

  “I will go,” lean replied. “I will get our supplies for the woodcutting and wait for the spring run westward. Arch and Agona will wait with me, I am sure. Stel’s trail must be north of us anyway. You go.”

  lean embraced Hagen and looked at Ahroe. She went to him and gave him the formal Shumai parting, right hands, palms flat, touching three times. “Please don’t tell them how well equipped Stel was. It would only make trouble for Sagan.”

  “Sagan?”

  “Stel’s mother. I am sure she will speak to you if you stay long near Pelbarigan. You will know her by her gray eyes. If anyone else says she is Sagan, she will likely not have them.”

  “Gray eyes?”

  “Like Stel’s. Here is Assek’s knife. He dropped it climbing the tree after me.”

  lean took the skinning knife and looked at it briefly, then put it in his coat. He looked again at Ahroe, standing straight-backed, a head shorter than he. A look of pain went across his face like a flight of birds. Then he embraced Ahroe, hard, and Hagen once more, and set off down the outcrop toward the guardsmen.

  “We will need to arc out northwestward, Ahroe,” said Hagen.

  “You will lead, then?”

  Abroe gave one backward glance. The two guardsmen were standing, far off, in the snow, as lean trotted lightly toward them.

  The two walked and jogged northwest until well into twilight. Then Hagen stopped near a stream in a wooded cove. He looked worried. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Unless he turned straight north, we should have crossed his trail. Even after that snow, I know I would have seen it. And even with his snow sliders.”

  “Perhaps he didn’t come this far.”

  “We will have to loop back. But that could have happened only if he stopped. Would he have stopped so soon? I hardly think it.”

  “He may have assumed that he was out of danger after the snow.”

  “Surely he would know we could track him.”

  “Stel is a builder, a carpenter, a stone worker. He sings well and plays the flute. He is not a hunter.”

  “We will have to camp now and loop back in the morning then. Now, do you have that small kettle?” Hagen took from a small bag the weed seeds he had stripped off stray plants as they walked. Ahroe unpacked the kettle and some dried meat. Both were very hungry, and unsatisfied by the small meal, even with sweetened tea. Hagen went away to set some snares, returning so quietly that Ahroe didn’t hear him.

  “I felt, almost at sunset, as if we had almost found him,” she said.

  “Near sunset? So did I. We call that the radiation of the quarry. I wish you had told me. It always means something. With us, if two feel it, we are much more careful. I am worried. I think we may get more snow.”

  In the morning, Ahroe again had difficulty getting going, but she was pushed by further anxiety now. Hagen’s snares had caught one rabbit, a thin and stringy creature, but they took the time to roast it and eat it all with tea before starting out.

  This time they arced back southward, swinging east. Within six ayas they picked up Stel’s trail. Hagen swore quietly, kneeling and studying it. “This was made a full day ago,” he said. “He must have stopped ahead. We were very near him.”

  They set out westward on the trail, trotting as fast as they could, Hagen looking back at Ahroe and occasionally waiting for her. Then as Hagen topped a small hill he stopped. Ahroe came up to him. Plainly Stel had camped below, among a grove of black oaks, and had made no effort to hide anything he did. As they came into the camp, they noticed an odd sign made of twigs bound with bark, in the shape of a fish with an arrow point for a tongue, and a notched, forked tail.

  “That is Stel’s symbol for me,” said Ahroe. “Look, there is a message tied to it.” She took down a large piece of bark from the twig construction and sat on her heels to read it. Hagen looked at her a long moment, then climbed the hill to look westward.

  The message began with another arrow-tongued fish:

  I heard voices a while ago, and from the hill I saw you and the Shumai walking north. How much I wish I could have talked to you, but you had your bow, and your companion, and I know that I can never return to Pelbarigan and slave for the Dahmens. They tried to kill me once and would try again. I mean to give them no more chances. If we could meet unarmed and talk, or even if I could talk knowing that you wouldn’t force me to go back, I think we might reach some solution. But perhaps not. You seem to have accepted the Dah-men view of life and me, and perhaps even consented to my death in the river.

  It will do you no good to follow me. I am fresh, rested, well fed, armed now, determined, resolved, fat, juicy, eager, and feeling the full vigor, as they say, of youth. If you follow, I will escape. If you catch up, which is not likely, that is to say, nearly impossible, someone will die—either the Shumai or me. I feel the snow coming. I have my sliders. By the time you double back, I will be far gone and going farther. Where I do not know.

  Perhaps, if I live to be old, I will return to Northwall someday, and perhaps see you, and your next husband, should he survive, your children, and grandchildren (which, I hope, for their sake, are all women). I will never have anyone but you, for strange as it may seem, I love you, but I am giving all that up now. It is that or die, isn’t it. There is your second cousin Spek, who will marry you, I am sure, once the desertion period has passed. I don’t know how Spek is in your eyes, but a speck in the eyes is better than a Stel in the river. Perhaps my adventures will rival those of Jestak, though I doubt it, since I am more of a crow than a hero, slighter than a fighter, no substitute for a brute.

  And so, Ahroe, this is good-bye. At some time, in some place, how much we could have loved each other. How many songs I would have sung you, how many chidren would have laughed with us. But it is all failed. My fault. I don’t mind dying all that much, but not for nothing, not for your gang of Dahmen crones and witches. My price is more than a block of ice. May Aven bless you in all ways, give you peace and wholeness, grant you long life, friends, and a more adequate husband. Stel.

  Ahroe looked up. Hagen had returned and stood looking at her. “He thinks my family meant to kill him. He thinks I knew it and agreed to it.”

  “It is beginning to snow.”

  “We had better hurry.”

  Hagen held up his hand. “No. He is gone now. Look at the signs. He can outrun us on the snow sliders. We are in for a good snow. Look. He has eaten well, even dug cattails for himself. He has made a bow and killed rabbits and even a tanwolf. That I find hard to believe. He has made himself a flute, even. Perhaps he was incautious to think that he would not be followed this far, but he is very resourceful. He has learned to use the snow sliders well, and already he is through with his first travel soreness. He left shortly after he saw us pass—so the tracks say.”

  Ahroe stood up. “I will follow him.”

  “You mustn’t. There is the child.”

  “Who wants it now?”

  “Atou—Aven, you call Him? Besides, it is in you. It will not go away. If you don’t give it health, it will not give you health.”

  Ahroe kicked aside the fish symbol and started trotting along Stel’s departing trail. Snow was falling now, and looking west as she gained the hill crest, she could see a gray wall of it, with Stel’s tracks vanishing into it. Hagen came up to her. “We will go to Black Bull Island until spring,” he said. “I will stay with you, and when the baby is born, and grown some, then we will go west and look for Stel.”

  “You said yourself that the country is immense.”

  “But it is nearly empty. Stel will look for people. I have talked with him and know how he loves people. If he is alive, we will find him with people. He is a skillful man and will be welcomed.”

  “That will be over a year.”

  “What?”

  “Before we could go.”

  “Probably two years. Does he age quickly, this Stel?”

  “I can’t stand it.”

  “You could go back.”
>
  Ahroe shuddered. “No. I would feel their eyes on me always.”

  “If Stel can stand it, if Assek could stand it, if I can stand it, if Venn could stand it, then you can stand it.” “Who is Venn?”

  “She was my wife.”

  “What did she stand?”

  “She stood me. She stood the Tantal. What we all stand is what we have to stand. We can’t step out of life as if it were a coat.”

  The snow now caught them in a whirl of flakes, the far world disappearing. Ahroe looked a long while, with Hagen standing by her. Finally, he touched her shoulder and said, “Come on. Stel left a lot of tanwolf hanging in a tree for us. It is stringy as wood and tough as leather, but I am hungry and I mean to eat some. Come on.”

  Ahroe didn’t move, but finally, when the old Shumai had built a fire and had nearly roasted the remains of the tanwolf, she slowly came down the hill and joined him.

  6

  Stel was walking through flowers of a kind he didn’t know. The breeze was dry and balmy, but a light dew held down the dust among the bunchy grasses. For the ten thousandth time, he scanned the horizon for some sign of human habitation or passage. Here there were no trails.

  During the waning winter, he had run across ruins and spent three nights, ill and weak, beneath an enormous slab of artificial stone, canted down from a tall, single artificial stone pillar. Three others, still standing nearby, at different angles and heights, led Stel to surmise that this had been some sort of bridge. But there was nothing to bridge, and fragments of broken artificial stone lay beneath the structure. He couldn’t understand, but at last he began to gain some sense of the strength and ability of the ancients, and of the colossal disaster of the time of fire. Jestak had told them of it after his return from the east, but no one fully accepted his stories, and even after his western journey, and his return to Northwall, most did not grasp their implications.

  Here, in this place of desolation, this winter of wind, dry grass, white rabbits, and white owls, men had toiled to set up these towers. There must have been many workers. Stel had thought about it until he couldn’t stand the sound of the wind curling in under the great slab, and so he had left, walking westward in a daze, turning south for a time, then west, then northerly again, without real purpose or much goal.

  Should he have called to Ahroe? Should he have chanced that a meeting would have turned out favorably? Ahroe. The winter contained none of her softness, but only the coldness of the Dahmens. How many times, shivering in the wind, had the river risen up again around him in his imagination, the ice breaking again and again as he desperately tried to roll out onto it.

  The muck of the thaw, too, which made his hunting harder, seemed more miserable, and when the high flocks of geese went over, snows, blues, the great dark ones, crying in their freedom and yearning for the north, Stel’s heart wrung within him, thinking of Pelbarigan and the great passing lines of birds. What was there at home a strange lifting of the spirit was here so intense a loneliness that at times he covered his ears from the sound, squeezing eyes tight shut, eyelids smarting.

  Perhaps it was his flute that made life endurable for him. In the evening, especially, Stel would finger his way through all the songs to Aven that he could recall, until the music itself populated the darkness, and the great meanings and human hopes lifted him from himself to ponder the sweeping themes of universal destiny. Still, he always awoke weary, and the hard sunlight brought with it the fact of his aloneness.

  Now that he was walking through the strange yellow flowers, he went slowly, his belly full of fish snared in a slow-moving prairie stream. He played the flute lightly as he went, intermittently, having begun, with spring, to recover his vague purpose of seeking out the great sea of the west, if there were such a thing. It was something to do.

  After playing the song called “Aven, My Wall, My Unreachable Tower,” Stel thought he heard a phrase or two of it coming back to him, changed, in a different timbre. He stopped. No, there was nothing. He repeated the phrase, slowly and distinctly. Yes, there it was again. Stel stirred himself into a trot, moving northwest, up a hillside, toward the sound. He seemed to lose it. Stopping, he fingered out the phrase again. Very close came the quavering out of the return. Stel heard a scraping, and for a long moment, he saw the grinning face of a dark-skinned boy, his head shaved except for a long hank of hair braided out from the top of his crown. The boy’s face turned solemn; then, like the fall of a tree, his whole expression turned to surprise and, shrieking, he disappeared down the other side of the rock and fled up the hill. Stel watched, then slowly followed. After half an ay as, he hit a path, obviously well used, passed between two large rocks, feeling watched, and heard, in the distance, a faint chant of numerous voices. Gradually it became audible. “Diu heer es nu may nezumi iro. Diu heer es nu may nezumi iro. Diu heer es nu may nezumi iro.” The sound grew louder, and Stel, advancing in fear and anxiety, yet eager for humanity, saw a line of young men, all shaved bald, bare to the waist, dark-skinned and sleek, advancing single file down the trail, keeping time with their walking by chanting. They came toward him, seeming almost not to notice him, though they clearly did.

  Finally the front man put on a high headdress of wood and colored feathers, raised his arms, and stopped, the column splitting, alternately, walking around Stel, passing him on both sides, close, he stopping bewildered, they then turning and stopping, though the chant continued, low and insistent, still in time, “Diu heer es nu may nezumi iro.” The man with the headdress lowered his arms, and the men closest to Stel gently urged him forward by the elbows, still chanting. All the procession, then, moved down the path together, finally coming into the cleft of a small valley.

  Many more people lined the path, perhaps eighty or ninety, Stel thought, the men all shaved, the women with very long hair. All were dark, and all looked at Stel with fascination. As they came near, all took up the chant. Stel and his procession were impelled toward a central square of flat laid stones, perhaps sixty arms around, in a circle. At one end of it was a raised dais, and on that a chair in which an extremely old man sat, bent, but leaning forward with eagerness toward Stel and his party as they came nearer.

  The two lines of men brought Stel before the old man, then left him abruptly, moving to stand on either side of him. The man with the headdress shifted around behind. This close, Stel had a good look at the old man, who peered at him through bleared but dark eyes, his head thrust forward, the lines of his neck creasing the skin in deep folds, coming together below the throat like a leather necklace. Except for a cloth around his hips, the man was naked, and he was completely unadorned. As his mOuth hung open, Stel could see only one tooth, in the bottom front, jutting up like a small rift of snow at the entrance of a cave.

  Finally the old man rose, with surprising quickness, and came down to Stel, peering at him. Stel smiled. Then, catching a whiff of the old man’s damp breath, like rotting fish, Stel drew his face tight in a noncommittal politeness. The old man walked all around him, growing more excited, finally thrusting his face close to Stel’s, looking hard in his eyes. Then he took one of Stel’s hands, which were hardened and dirty with the winter and his wandering. The old man peered at it, then thrust it down with a murmur of disgust.

  He then returned to his chair and sat still for a very long moment, during which Stel was aware of silence and a quarreling of birds in the background. Finally, the old man stood up again, suddenly, and said, “Ik dik sa. Diu heer es nu may nezumi iro. Ik da sa.”

  A general roar of approval swelled up. Stel found himself impelled in a rush up a long rough rock stairs by and behind the old man, toward another paved area. In the center of it was one large, square stone, with a trough grooved into it, though a shallow one, as long as a man. Near one end stood a short-handled spear in a socket cut in the stone. It was upright, tipped with a large head made of glistening black stone, chipped neatly in the shape of a large narrow leaf. Beyond the pavement, two stone houses stood like over
turned bowls, circular, each perhaps fifteen arms across. They were thatched with rushes. Glancing at them, Stel was startled to see that they stood at the edge of a rocky outcrop dropping off perhaps thirty arms to a dry wash behind. Then, in the distance, he could see in haze, trees and rising mountains to the west.

  But he had no time to look. The chanting and chattering crowd brought him to the right of the square rock, and then a tall young woman came from the bowl-shaped house on that side. She was thin, dark-haired, lighterskinned than the rest. She wore a long maroon robe and a heavy gold necklace, and walked in strangely high wooden sandals. The crowd suddenly fell completely silent, and Stel could hear the wood click as she slowly came toward him. He felt a series of chills chase themselves down his back.

  She came all the way up to him, looking at him with eyes blue as chicory flowers. Like the old man, she walked all around him, slowly, with a look of growing contempt on her face. Stel said nothing. He felt like an object about to be bought at Pelbar trade week. Standing in front of him again, she took his face in her hands and opened his mouth, peering in at his teeth, then let go and took two sweeping steps back, glancing around at the crowd, then gesturing. She cried out, “Das corb furui? Das corb furui? Ah. Welve mo an das corb furui?”

  The crowd sucked back, then stubbornly began again the chant, “Diu heer es nu may nezumi iro,” but she suddenly let out a scream, flinging her arms in the air, pivoting to face them all. They fell silent.

  “If you don’t mind,” Stel said quietly, “I’d really like to know what this is ail about. I believe I’ve stumbled onto a stage during the winter festival. I will gladly turn around and . . .”

  The woman whirled toward him, raised her arms, and shrieked out again. Stel gathered that she wanted him to be quiet. Then, startlingly, she took hold of a cord around the neck of her robe, pulling it with a dramatic gesture. The robe fell at her feet, leaving her completely naked.

  Before she stepped out of her sandals, the crowd murmured in unison and knelt down, heads to the pavement. Stel didn’t. He looked at the sky, then the far horizon, then, at his feet, then at hers in front of his. He looked up. She stood glaring at him, proud and uncomfortably close. Stel had never seen that much of Ahroe, even, surely not in the sunlight. He was profoundly embarrassed. But she was intensely lovely, bizarre and different as she might be. Her beauty radiated from her like a fragrance. Every detail of her body struck his imagination as perfect. Stel felt slightly dizzy. She turned and walked slowly away toward the stone house, never looking back. Stel found himself looking at the dimples, one on each side, at the top of her buttocks. He had never seen anything like that before, and somehow they seemed at odds with her comic dignity. He laughed aloud. She wheeled around at the door of her house, her face contorted in anger, seeming not like a goddess of physical beauty, but simply a woman who had misplaced her clothing.